Friday, February 09, 2007

Doorway to Heaven.

Living in student halls is a beautiful thing, all the new friends, parties and living so close to the university.

Oh and getting the fire door kicked down by strangers at 4am. That’s always a bonus. It happened on Monday night in the deep, dark depths of the morning.

You see Monday night, is the ‘student night’, where a lot of students go to the Union bar, which is called ‘The Undercroft.’ So obviously, you expect rowdy people in the wee hours, hell, I have been one of them several times, but damaging doors for the sake of it?

For about a half hour, I had been in bed listening to the drunken ramblings of some people who don’t even live on my corridor.

Enough was enough, I was getting ready to go and tell them where they could go, then BOOOOOOOF, BOOOOOOOOOG BANNNNNNG. I was scared witless, I didn’t want to open my door after that.

The door had obviously been knocked down, and then we heard footsteps running through the corridor and that’s the last I remember.

The next morning, the door was absolutely trashed, the glass knocked out, the handle RIPPED OFF, how does anyone do that?!

Right now, there are drills going off (my brain is vibrating) making new windows in our shiny new door. On reporting it to reception, I found it had happened on two other floors.

What annoys me the most is the fact that people can get in and do that? It says a lot about the security of our halls, where I think more security than say in a house is needed. The doors are obviously inadequate and serve more as an obstacle to drunken louts than a way of leaving the building in a fire.

We only have one security guard on, and he is certainly not up to the job in my opinion. Yes that is defamatory, but they the alternating guards all seem to be old, with little English and did I mention old?

With all the students in campus, you’re telling me that we have ONE security man at night? Well I do feel safe now.

2 comments:

Ash said...

that's shitty. a good way to do something about it? a story for the new website. 'security failures at westminster' or something like that. you could even see how easy it is to break in as an experiment...

Annabel said...

I've hardly been in halls for the past few weeks myself, but this is appalling.

Perhaps working it into a feature like Ash suggests, and getting as much publicity as poss, could bring about some changes - but then again the hall office is staggeringly incompetent, so we shouldn't get our hopes up too much.